I finished weaving off the 8-yard bookmark warp, plus another 2-yard warp. Actually, I finished these more than a week ago, but just haven't gotten around to photographing them. I've been busy doing contract spinning and trying to live with and around and through sorrow. Thank you to everyone for the kind comments on my last post.

Weaving these was so much fun. They're relatively fast, and varying the treadling with almost every bookmark meant that there was always something creative going on.



They looked so pretty all rolled up on the cloth beam, and then there was the delightful moment when I cut the warp off the back beam and saw them all together.



If you want to practice your hemstitching, put a bookmark warp on the loom. I got 29 bookmarks (of varying lengths, depending on the treadling pattern) out of the 8-yard warp, and another five out of the 2-yard warp, which means that I hemstitched 68 ends. I've always enjoyed hemstitching, and I got very fast at it.



Much of the warp used various colors of mercerized cotton as weft. I have five colors of fine cotton, and used them alone and in combination:

• red alone
• orange alone
• alternating picks of red and orange
• blue alone (doubled as it's very fine)
• gray alone (doubled as it's very fine)
• alternating picks of doubled blue and gray
• single strands of blue and gray held together
• brown alone
  
• alternating picks of brown and red
  

I also did a batch with silk weft, some plain white for elegance (I just love the white on white patterned shine)



and some with a bright kelly green that I dyed. I also overdyed some of the finished bookmarks.



Left to right, these are white on white silk overdyed deep forest green, gray cotton weft overdyed purple, kelly green silk weft overdyed turquoise, orange cotton weft overdyed scarlet, and white on white silk overdyed scarlet.

The overdying worked just as I planned. Since I use Jacquard acid dyes, the cotton wefts didn't change color, only the silk warp. The gray cotton stayed gray, and the orange cotton stayed orange. The colored silk weft, the kelly green one, did change with the overdying but it is still greener than the turquoise warp, as planned. The finished bookmarks look beautifully rich and glowing. I especially like the purple and gray one.

I also did a batch with the green singles linen that I used before. I finished them the same as before, with a hot hot soak until the dye stopped leaving the linen, then setting it into the silk with citric acid and the microwave. I really like this look.



After I finished the 8-yard warp, I immediately measured out another out of the same 20/2 silk yarn. This one was only two yards but I dyed it a lovely medium forest green. I measured the warp before dyeing, and also put a skein of the same yarn in the dye pot to use as weft. Actually, I put the weft yarn in first, so that it would go slightly darker than the warp, then left them both in the kettle overnight to cool down and fully exhaust the dyebath.



These five bookmarks from the 2-yard warp are all 100% silk, and I think they are my favorites so far. The three on the left have the slightly darker forest green silk as weft, and the two on the right have white silk as weft.

(Photographing all this shiny silk has been a challenge.)

I had a thought as I was weaving all these bookmarks, especially the green warp. I'm making ribbon. This actually looks like ribbon! Handmade ribbon!



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The commercial: These will all be listed in my Etsy shop. If you see one you want, email me, as they will be listed over several days.

Today is a sore heart day.

My mother-in-law lost her battle with cancer and passed away early this morning. A year and three months from diagnosis.

I don't know what to say. It's not fair.

Everyone hug someone you love today.

Dear metastatized melanoma cancer cells that today were declared untreatable and are killing my mother in law:

You suck.

OK, so I've not been in a blogging mood recently. Obviously. I even missed my own 5th blogiversary back on the 18th. It's been a stressful little while here, what with the severe reduction in my hours at work, and Shaun's nine-month University contract schedule which means that he doesn't start getting paid again until Oct. 1. Next week can't come fast enough.

Anyway, the whole taking pictures and downloading them and resizing them and posting them and composing the text of a post has seemed like an ordeal, one that I didn't have enough energy to contemplate, even though I have several projects I'd like to share. I actually finally got to it this afternoon, though, and would like to show you this:



Regular sock yarn, pretty, soft, 75% superwash merino, 25% nylon, blah blah blah. Looks like regular sock yarn skeins. Pretty but seen everywhere across the interwebs.

However, this sock yarn looked like this before it grew up into pretty twisted skeins:



I- me personally- MADE this sock yarn. This is the Fiber Optic pencil roving (colorway Superstition) that I purchased and started spinning at Sock Summit. I spun these skeins on a SPINDLE!



To say that I am proud of this yarn would be an understatement.



It looks like regular 3-ply sock yarn. It is squooshy and soft and has a nice bouncy firm twist. I made it on a SPINDLE!

Each skein is 56 grams. One skein measured at 220 yards, and the other at 230 yards, which in my book is an acceptable variation, given the inaccuracy of measuring yardage on a niddy-noddy. The singles were spun on my Spindlewood square mini, and I chain-plied it on my wheel.

I preserved the color sequence of the roving between the two skeins, since the pencil roving was dyed with two strands held together. I spun each starting from the same end, and since each half of the roving took two spindlefuls, when I transferred the cops to the storage bobbin, I rewound them twice to maintain the proper directionality. I hope to get similar striping patterns when I knit the socks.



I don't know if I'll be able to bear to walk in the socks, though!

I seem to be on a weaving kick right now. I just finished up a batch of bookmarks:



This was a fun and easy project, and quite gratifying. I did this entire project yesterday, all the way from measuring the warp to ironing the finished bookmarks. The warp is 20/2 silk, and the wefts are various. Left to right, they are:

• white-same 20/2 silk as the warp
  
• purple- the hand dyed merino/silk handspun singles left over from my amethyst bird's eye twill shawl.
  
• blue- the other hand dyed merino/silk handspun singles, left over from my sapphire fancy twill shawl.
  
• red- unknown mercerized cotton, about the same diameter as the warp yarn
  
• gold- singles linen, about the same diameter as the warp yarn (mystery yarn that came with my loom, originally dyed green)

The purple and blue were plied to match the size of the warp yarn. I just did up little bits on a spindle, about 15 yards or so for each. A bookmark doesn't take much! I didn't even wet the yarns to reactivate the singles twist and balance the yarn after plying. I didn't want to wait for them to dry, so I just used them with active twist and the curling bookmark flattened out like magic when I wet-finished it.

The gold bookmark was originally to be green weft and white warp, but when I tested a piece of the linen yarn, it started losing dye (thank goodness I tested!). So I cut it off before wet-finishing the rest. The other four I finished normally (warm soapy water, moderate agitation, warm rinse, blot in a towel, iron firmly) and they came out great. I love the way wet-finishing really completes a piece of weaving. Especially silk- ironing really brings out the shine.

For the green one, though, I decided that if it wanted to bleed, well then let it bleed. I soaked it in a jar of hot water with a drop of dish soap, and shook it vigorously and repeatedly. When the soak water stopped getting darker, I added some citric acid, shook it up again, and microwaved it for three rounds of three minutes, waiting about five minutes in between. I was hoping that the silk warp would absorb the excess dye from the weft.

It worked! After the bookmark was cool, I rinsed it in hot water and no dye came out. Yay! I actually like the overdyed version better than the original white and green. The silk warp turned greeny-gold, and the linen weft turned antique bronze. It actually looks metallic, with the shine from the silk.



These are all from one 2-yard warp, with the same threading, tie-up, and warp sett (34 epi). The white and purple even have the same treadling; the difference in the look of the pattern comes from the density of the weft packing. The white one is very dense, to the point of being stiff (14 pattern repeats), while the purple one is a bit more drapey (6 pattern repeats). The other three each have a different treadling.



The draft is one I made up. The first treadling (white and purple bookmarks) was the one that I came up with at the computer while planning the project, and the other three I made up at the loom as I was weaving. Both ends of each bookmark are hemstitched.

I like them all, but I have to admit that I'm partial to the white one. It's weighty and substantial, and the white-on-white is so elegant.



Because these are made with fine yarns, they are all nice and flat and thin- one of my prime requirements for a bookmark, so that it doesn't damage the spine of the book. I enjoyed doing this so much that I immediately put another bookmark warp on the loom. Eight yards! Look for bookmarks in my Etsy shop...

I had a quick weaving project on the go over the past couple weeks, to put in my Etsy shop.



Quick in terms of time actually spent working on it, that is. I did most of it (measuring the warp, sleying, threading, beaming, and weaving) in two days during the week before Sock Summit. I just got around to twisting the fringe yesterday. So it was a three day weaving project, spread over three weeks.



The warp is Jaggerspun Superfine Merino 18/2, and the weft is my own handspun; the Strawberry-Rhubarb laceweight that I spun from top purchased from the Zarzuela's Fibers Etsy shop last year.



Warp: 18/2 merino, used double (4 oz, plus 0.6 oz loom waste)
Weft: handspun merino laceweight, bought as hand dyed top (45 wpi, used 1.7 oz)
12 epi (remember the warp threads are doubled)
on the loom measurements: 14" x 75"
finished measurements: 13" x 70", with 5" twisted fringe



The pattern is one from A Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns. I quite like the way it came out.



I do like the "right side", the side I was looking at as I wove, more than the reverse, though. It's the one on the right in the picture above, and looks like a diagonal basketweave, while the reverse is a very subtle zigzaggy pattern. They're both nice, but the basketweave pops more.



I also really like the way the weft works in the piece. The marled yarn and its long sections of subtly shifting color intensities is really pretty.



And it's long enough and wide enough to be worn as a stole,



as a regular scarf,



or (my favorite) as a doubled-and-looped-through scarf.



The fabric is lightweight enough that even folded in half width-wise, then doubled and looped, as in that last picture, it doesn't feel overly bulky, just snuggly and cozy.

Using my own handspun is incredibly satisfying.

I've been doing a lot of spinning in the past couple years, and when I sat down to my wheel on Saturday afternoon, I realized that it was getting hard to treadle. I started troubleshooting- it wasn't wood rubbing on wood from the treadle and it wasn't the drive wheel sticking since it would spin freely when the drive band was off. I narrowed it down to the flyer mechanism, specifically the bearing hub that carries the back end of the flyer spindle in the back support. The shaft itself was also a bit draggy and the bobbin didn't spin as freely as I would like.

I took the rear hub off and cleaned it by flushing WD-40 through it. It worked really well to hold it at an angle and use the straw attachment on the can to spray in the top of the front and let the WD-40 run through and out the bottom of the front. I did it several times, and the black gunk and fiber dust that came out was incredible. I've never cleaned inside this piece before, so it's likely that this is the first time it's been cleaned in 21 years.

While I was at it, I also used some 0000 steel wool and WD-40 on the flyer shaft to smooth out any gummy spots.

Then, I figured since I had the wheel in the garage, I might as well clean the drive wheel axle. Since it was there, you know. Before I knew it, my wheel looked like this:



I partially disassembled it so I could more easily access the main hub and bearing. I ended up not taking the drive wheel completely off, since the pin through the hub into the axle was really firmly in place and I didn't want to damage anything, but other than that, this wheel is really easy to break down and put back together. I flushed the brass bearing with WD-40 (more gunk! yay!) and gave all the wood a coat of Danish Oil, since it's been a year and a half since the wood has been treated.



Hello, beautiful...



This is my favorite part of the wheel. The walnut inlay is so pretty.

So that was my unexpected Saturday. I didn't plan to take my wheel completely apart, but I'm glad I did. Sunday, I had a marathon spinning session, spinning 24 ounces (a pound and a half!) of fine cashmere singles in ~8 effortless hours. The time spent thoroughly cleaning the wheel was well worth it.